Silviculture and Cinegetics Review - Societatea Progresul Silvic

FORESTRY BELTS SILVICULTURE AND CINEGETICS REVIEW XVII/30/2012
Although at the beginning of the 20th century our
country, through the shelterbelt programme for
Bărăgan, Ialomiţa and Brăila regions, was first
worldwide ranked in this domain, after 1962, the
political regime of that period decided to cut off most
of forest shelterbelts. Only the forest shelterbelts
established by the Romanian foresters in the
Cadrilater (Southern part of the Dobrogea, ceded to
Bulgaria in 1940), in the interwar period, have been
maintained and remain functional.
The question of forest shelterbelts in Romania was
returned after 1989, and the Law no. 289/2002 create
the legal frame for their establishment (Ianculescu,
2001; ***, 2002a; ***, 2002b).
The paper represents a synthesis of the research
outcomes gathered in the field of the forest
shelterbelts, of the gained experience also of
designing and implementation of the forest
shelterbelts, and has prevalently approached the
Danube Plain and the Dobrogea Plateau, because in
these regions there are signals of degrading processes
of environmental conditions, especially the drying
aspect (Costăchescu and Dănescu, 2005, 2006;
Mihăilă, 2006; Dănescu and Costăchescu, 2009).
This paper addresses to the experts in agriculture and
silviculture, the institutions responsible for fundament
agriculture and forestry policies, and physical and
juridical person wishing to establish forest
shelterbelts, presenting available solutions to achieve
the forest shelterbelts networks at territorialadministrative
level, based on current conditions:
environmental, land use and land register.
2. Materials and methods
To establish the forest shelterbelts network at the level
of geographical units discussed (the Danube Plain and
Dobrogea), based on the results of the previous
research studies that became official by technical
norms, only arable lands and pastures were considered
(by orthophotomaps vectorization at 1:5000 scale),
being excluded from the beginning the orchards,
vineyards, built settlements and, of course, the lands
covered by forest vegetation. Therefore, it resulted the
total infield area considered for establishment of the
forest shelterbelts network (2.806.989 ha in the
Danube Plain and 679.958 ha in Dobrogea).
2.1. Theoretical location of the forest shelterbelts
network in the Danube Plain and Dobrogea
In order to adopt the technical solutions to establish
the shelterbelts, it was necessary to framing the
ecological site conditions of the analyzed territory.
During this stage an important phase was the
establishment of the dominant soil types in all
localities, mentioning that the preliminary
classification was made based on the information
provided by the pedological map scale 1:200 000,
carried out by the RIPA (Research Institute of
Pedology and Agrochemistry) (***, 1963-1986), over
which were overlapped administrative boundaries of
localities. For this purpose it was necessary the
preliminary geo-reference of the soil map, using ortorectified
aerial images.
The afforestation solutions were established by soil
types and soil types groups ecologically similar,
linking the ecological requirements of species with the
ecological soils characteristics. Transfer the
afforestation solutions on the plans was, therefore,
carried out by their association with the soils already
highlighted on the working maps.
Over these layers of diverse information
(geographical, hydrological, pedological, afforestation
solutions, administrative, infrastructure, etc.), was
established the theoretical network of forest
shelterbelts (Figure 1). The network consists of the
main shelterbelts spaced at 600 m and secondary
shelterbelts that intersect the main shelterbelts at a
distance of 1200 m (this being the most frequent size
of agriculture plots).
Considering the direction and frequency of the
prevailing winds, the main shelterbelts were northsouth
oriented. For reasons related to the necessity to
compensate the protective effect reduction due to the
increasing distances between the shelterbelts (to
distance optimal considered –1000 m x 500 m) by
increasing the width of the secondary shelterbelts, and
the necessity to simplify the design and subsequent
establishment of the network shelterbelts, for the
shelterbelts a unique width of 10 m was adopted.
The theoretical network of shelterbelts was interrupted
in the crossing points with the main communication
ways (railways, highways, national roads and county
roads) and with the waters (rivers, lakes, ponds).
The network shelterbelts area of localities, land use
categories and afforestation solutions were resulted of
overlapping that network over the above-mentioned
information layers, on that basis being further
determined also the required quantity of afforestation
stock.
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